I've been in a slowed reading pattern again. This time it's not a result of being busy at work or occupied at home. Instead it's because I picked up Donald Ray Pollock's collection Knockemstiff. Not that there's anything remotely difficult about the prose, but what you have are plots and characters that are the literary equivalent of bottom-shelf vodka. Every story is like a shot that will burn you a new one going down but in the end, once a few shots have been forced down, you start to get the same feeling that you would from the top-shelf stuff. But it's not something, the collection or the vodka, that I'm comfortable finishing in one sitting.

Sorry to sound so vague but it's the best way I know how to describe it at this point. I'll have more when I can get through the whole book. Has anyone else read Knockemstiff? Comments?

By the way, I do recommend the book highly. It is an impressive debut from someone who has spent most of his 40-something years as a factory worker. There's a lot of parallels that one can draw to Larry Brown here. You can tell that a lot of these characters have been inside his head for a while. And the stories, well, there's stuff that would make Palahniuk blush.

When people in town said inbred, what they really meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creep country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio--old-people glasses and acne sprouts and a bony chicken chest. You ever try to be someone like that? When you're fourteen, it's worse than being dead. And so when the old man sawed off Daniel's hair with a butcher knife, the same one his mom used to slice rings of red bologna and scrape the pig's jowl, he might as well have cut the boy's head off, too.

June 12, 2008

Barthelme on MTV? I remember when these spots aired originally, back long ago when I had to walk three miles every Saturday to my 4am college class in three feet of snow. What are the odds of something similar being shown on today's MTV? And whatever happened to Timothy Hutton?

June 11, 2008

But isn't it interesting that only the title of the book appears?
Where's Kerouac's name? Could it be that the words appeal but the
person who penned the words might turn off the Beemer drivers they are
trying to attract? Who knows. Maybe I'm just being sensative. Judge
for yourself.

I wish I could tell you that I found this on Google, but I didn't. It's an article claiming that there's a possibility we are dumber because of the Internet, more specifically Google. Really, that's all you need to know. You should probably not click on the link. Don't want you getting dumber on me:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

June 10, 2008

Alec Niedenthal, a 17-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama, took it to the NYT Book Reviewers in a letter to the editor that the Times published last weekend. Responding to Dwight Garners review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland in which Garner clamors for "“the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror", Niedenthal responds:

Don’t worry; we’re working on it. You’ve heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone by your Youth right under your collective noses: the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes.

It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.

And do you think the editors of the Times Book Review just aren’t paying attention?

They’re not paying attention. ... I think it’s really hard for them to look outside of their own purview of the literary world. Not that I’m an expert or anything at all, but that’s what I’ve gotten from reading it a good while, that it’s very incestuous. I really enjoy reading it, but they could stand to step outside themselves a little. I’m sorry if that sounds elitist. They’re all of a single mind-set, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think I have enough experience to really comment because I’m so new to this kind of thing. But the old literary generation is going to die off eventually, and it’s quite obvious that this new generation is going to be a lot more adventurous and experimental. {emphasis mine}

What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.

So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode.

I doubt she could have expected much but come on! This is Chuck Palahniuk we're talking about here. The guy has made a pretty nice career out of this type of formula and performs in front of fairly large crowds everywhere he reads, all hoping for him to make them pass out. He hands out blow-up dolls for prizes. He's not trying to save the novel or the book review or literature as a whole. He's trying to entertain, to titillate, to make you line up for his next book and possibly his next movie (which comes out in September).

I've always been on the fence when it comes to Palahniuk. I do enjoy his shtick from time to time, but I mostly relegate him to a category of writers I refer to as the "discount paperback" writers. I don't go out and buy these writers' books when they first come out. I'll wait until I see their books show up on the discount table or at the used book shop. But when I do sit down to read Palahniuk, I don't all of sudden froth at the mouth and condemn all of American culture because of its Kings and its Crichtons and its Palahniuks. I do that when I see yet another dancing/singing/nose-picking talent show on yet another network or another sequel to another movie that should have never been made in the first place. Or when Madonna puts out another album.

June 09, 2008

In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.

Many top-selling writers, such as John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark, have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.

Not that writers are being explicitly harassed, but costly advance marketing plans are increasingly tied into the expectation that the most profitable authors will have a new book out at roughly the same time each year. In today's intensely competitive marketplace, readers will turn to another author if a writer fails to come through at the usual time, which could cost a publisher big bucks.

Many writers below the top tier are also being urged to pick up the pace. In some cases, publishers have made a book-per-year promise an explicit condition of taking on a new author.

It should probably be noted the J.C. Oates is not under this obligation. In fact, publishers have asked her to limit herself to two books a year, but she's yet to comply.

I once thought I would be the last remaining person alive above the age of 20 without a tattoo of some sort. I mean for a while there everyone and his sister was getting a tat of this or that on his or her parts. And it didn't matter what. Of course, part of the reason I never ventured down the path of permanent body marking is that it involves a certain level of pain and I'm one to avoid pain at all cost. Thus paying someone to cause me pain just for the sake of putting something on my body which in five years could become something I wanted to forget was just never going to happen. I was once tempted to get liquored up and have a birdie finger drawn on the back of my neck but regained sobriety in time to save myself the future removal fees. But now it seems the fad is, well, drying up. Not that they'll ever go away, especially the ones you've already got, so enjoy them if you got 'em. All this just to point out this post at the Guardian books blog by Shirley Dent defending the literary tattoo.

What we seek to do when we cut literature into our flesh is to make something metaphysical physical. We take tattooed literature into ourselves in the most superficial of ways, inscribing rather than imbibing its significance. Put another way, lit tats really are only skin deep, vainglorious and shallow all at once.

Couldn't the same be said of a favorite line from a RATT song or a beer that you want to remember drinking forever. I guess it's all about committing to something and having as part of that commitment an abiding love for the thing. But it would work just as well for me to photocopy and laminate a favorite poem or a line from Moby-Dick or whatever and put it my wallet. It's cheaper, safer, a lot less painful and won't sag or fade into something that might as we be Danielle Steel by the time I'm 60.

June 07, 2008

I usually try to avoid copying and pasting the final paragraph of anything, but I had to point this out:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

Ultimately, though, it will be about changing readers' perception of what a book is, right? I doubt that Writer X cares how the "book" gets to Reader Y, as long as a)Writer X knows that Reader Y will be able to get the "book" and b) Writer X gets some sort of financial reward for Reader Y getting the "book." So does it matter if Reader Y's definition of a book includes pixels as opposed to print? And does Reader Y even consider how Writer X feels or how Publisher Z feels about how Reader Y defines "book"?

June 06, 2008

When I’m writing a story and need a peripheral character run over by a truck, I name that character Charlie Long. Charlie Long was my basketball coach when I was ten years old. Among other encouraging words, he threatened to hang me from the basketball rim by my “dingle-dangle.”

Finn's lurid, novelistic songs about midwestern lowlife characters stuck somewhere between oblivion and redemption have earned him frequent comparisons to Bruce Springsteen - not the pumped-up Boss of Born in the USA, but the young greaser Bruce of Greetings from Asbury Park, only with a harder, less romantic edge. On the strength of four remarkable and increasingly sophisticated albums, Finn has established himself as America's reigning poet of drug-addled losers, the unflinching chronicler of their hard-luck adventures, nightmare visions, and occasional moments of grace. He's a sort of rock'n'roll Bukowski with a little Dylan thrown in for good measure, the kind of lyricist who can pull off an ambitious three-narrator song like Chillout Tent (from the Hold Steady's breakout 2006 record, Boys and Girls in America), in which two strangers who've overdosed at a rock festival end up getting it on in the medical tent: "They started kissing when the nurses took off their IVs/... they had the privacy of bedsheets/ The other kids were mostly in comas."

Once I get over my initial scepticism, though, I begin to see where Finn is coming from with this talk of aging gracefully. Despite the fact that the Hold Steady are a relatively new band - they released their first record, Almost Killed Me, in 2003 - they are not a young or glamorous one. Finn himself is 36, a short, bespectacled guy more likely to be mistaken for an associate professor of philosophy than a luminary at Lollapalooza. He comes across as a nice, unusually smart midwestern guy who's close to his parents and eager for a family of his own, the kind of decent, well-adjusted individual you'd be hard-pressed to find in one of his songs.

June 05, 2008

Still hot. Still busy. But I saw this post over at Cinematical about the transformation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road from page to screen and thought I would share:

The movie represents, to me, an opportunity to magnify the novel's triumphs and diminish its failures. Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and his crew have reportedly been putting in painstaking effort to bring the bleakness and emptiness of McCarthy's universe to the screen. Looking at the still on top of this page sends a chill down my spine: the desperation in Viggo Mortensen's eyes, the utter shell-shock on Kodi Smit-McPhee's face, the grime and dust and ash that cover them, all make it apparent that the movie isn't going to spare us any of the novel's emotional wallop, at least not intentionally. The book has been hailed as a masterpiece of raw, devastating simplicity, but stripping it of some of McCarthy's stylistic flourishes could make it stronger still.

June 04, 2008

The folks at Triple Canopy have alerted me to the fact that they have released the first installment of their second issue, which came as news to me because, frankly, I didn't know there was a first issue. But now I'm glad I do. And you will also, especially if you're a fan of Roberto Bolaño.

There shall be mostly silence around these parts the rest of the week. Blame end of fiscal year. Blame Excel's vlookup. Blame the too early in the summer 95 degree days. Blame the neck pain. Blame a Clinton.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as all that but just in case...

Here's a Tom Waits interview from 1976. In it he discusses some of his influences, including the Beats, and tries, in that uncertain way that only Tom Waits can "try", to explain why he doesn't necessarily consider himself a Beat.

The next step (after the rejection of the original “Road”) was to redo the subject, chronological account of the hero’s life, in regular gothic-Melvillian prose.

That was started with one magic chapter about a Denver football field. But then K said, shove publishing and literary preconceptions, I want something I can read, some interesting prose, for my old age. “Visions of Neal” and “Dr. Sax” (1951-53) and another dozen subsequent books (prose, poetry, biography, meditation, translation, sketching, novels, nouvelles, fragments of brown wrapping paper, golden parchments scribbled at midnight, strange notebooks in Mexico and Desolation Peak and Ozone Park) follow.

Writing is like piano playing, the more you do it the more you know how to play a piano. And improvise, like Bach.

Not a mechanical process: the mechanical and artless practice would have been to go on writing regular novels with regular types form and dull prose. Well, I don’t know why I’m arguing.Too many critics (all incomplete because they themselves do not know how to write). Pound said not to take advice from someone who had not himself produced a masterpiece.

Am I writing for The Village Voice or the Hearing of God? In a monster mechanical mass-medium age full of horrible people with wires in their heads; the explanation is hard to make, after everybody’s cash-conscious egotistical book-reviewing, trend-spotting brother has bespoke his own opinion.It’s all gibberish, everything that has been said. There’s not many competent explainers. I’m not speaking of the Beat Generation, which after all is quite an Angelic Idea. As to what non-writers, journalists, etc., have made of it, as usual—well, it’s their bad poetry not Kerouac’s.

Friend of SoT Jo just emailed me to let me know of a book critical essays dealing with the works of Larry Brown available from the University of Mississippi Press:

Larry Brown is noted for his subjects--rural life, poverty, war, and
the working class--and his spare, gritty style. Brown's oeuvre spans
several genres and includes acclaimed novels (Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, The Rabbit Factory, and A Miracle of Catfish), short story collections (Facing the Music, Big Bad Love), memoir (On Fire), and essay collections (Billy Ray's Farm).
At the time of his death, Brown (1951-2004) was considered to be one of
the finest exemplars of minimalist, raw writing of the contemporary
South.

Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South considers the
writer's full body of work, placing it in the contexts of southern
literature, Mississippi writing, and literary work about the working
class. Collectively, the essays explore such subjects as Brown's
treatment of class politics, race and racism, the aftereffects of the
Vietnam War on American culture, the evolution of the South from a
plantation-based economy to a postindustrial one, and male-female
relations. The role of Brown's mentors--Ellen Douglas and Barry
Hannah--in shaping his work is discussed, as is Brown's connection to
such writers as Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison. The volume is one of
the first critical studies of a writer whose depth and influence mark
him as one of the most well-regarded Mississippi authors.